The Vegetable Garden

One of the first spaces that Gilles Clément began to lay out after acquiring the land at La Vallée was the vegetable garden, which he described as the first room of his garden-house. A planted space with an aesthetic purpose but, above all, a productive one, it enabled him to feed himself during the months when he was building his house and shaping his garden.

In his book Le Salon des berces (The Cow Parsnip Lounge), Gilles Clément explains that the vegetable garden is a special kind of room. Of all the rooms in the house, it is the one that requires the most maintenance.

It is a space in which recycling is an essential tool for its functioning. Plant and food waste generate compost that is indispensable for the healthy development of the species planted there.

Two decades later, in 1997, Gilles Clément collaborated with the artist Jean-Paul Ruiz on the creation of a singular document born from the vegetable garden cultivated by his wife, Dominique Ruiz. On paper made from vegetables, Gilles Clément wrote a text paying tribute to these productive spaces:

That is why, in the face of technological tides, of concrete, of ornamental gardens painfully frozen behind their floral masks; in the face of lifted lawns where rows of ryegrass implants line up; in the face of the hormonally enhanced “greens” of chic golf courses, of monstrous roundabouts almost erupting with color; in the face of excess artifice, of distant nature reserves; in the face of all this—absolutely irreducible to fashions and passions—the vegetable garden remains.

“Re-cueille. L’enclos et la mesure” (Re-gather. Enclosure and Measure). Artist’s book (Jean-Paul Ruiz and Gilles Clément): 10 blades of grass on which the text is printed, 31 sheets of vegetable paper and 1 sheet of earth paper, placed in a glass greenhouse on a base layer of soil, insulated by a glass plate. 1997.